The universe has bestowed limitless and infinite powers on the human
consciousness. Along with being effective and successful in our personal and
professional spheres, we must realize that the purpose of human life is to
ensure the blossoming of our consciousness. In Celebrating Life, Rishi
Nityapragya offers the secret to being the best self you can be. This book will
give you an in-depth understanding of, and practical techniques for experiencing,
transformative changes-from negative to neutral, and from neutral to positive-by
helping you identify negative emotions and showing you ways to free yourself
from them. It will also help you learn to experience and relish the beautiful
flavours of life, like enthusiasm, love, compassion and truth, whenever and
wherever you want.
Celebrating Life is an intensely honest exploration of how to be the master of
circumstances and how to make life a celebration.
Archives: Books
Puffin Classics: Chandrakanta
The dashing Prince Virendra of Naugarh is madly in love with the breathtakingly beautiful Princess Chandrakanta of Vijaygarh. But there are obstacles galore in the paths of the lovers. There are evil ministers with sinister magicians at their beck and call; enemy kings only too happy to go into battle; masters of disguise who can fool the cleverest of spies; and magic all around.Then Chandrakanta gets trapped in a fantastic maze; from which only Virendra can rescue her. But will he be able to decipher the clues; follow the trail correctly and get to her before it is too late? And will their friends; Tej Singh; Chapla and the others; help them adequately with their deep knowledge of the art of divination and disguise?
Tooth And Nail, Fur And Scale
Displayed as found!
In the pages of history and in the dense undergrowth of human memory, we see glimpses of lurking fantastic beasts. Be honest-haven’t you felt them around you? Haven’t you been surprised by movement in the corner of your vision? By stirring shadows or a faint rustling in the dark?
The specimens in this exhibit of monsters from the Indian subcontinent have been hand-picked from musty old encyclopedias, murky urban legends, earthy folk tales and the white-hot bowels of mythology. Some have been stuffed to restore verisimilitude, but none were washed, painted or otherwise altered.
The Penguin Guide to Winning On the the Stock Market
To the uninitiated, the stock market can appear a forbidding place where years of savings can be wiped out overnight. Yet, for the informed investor, it is one of the most effective ways to increasing wealth. In this accessible guide, Ashu Dutt, author of The Penguin Guide to Personal Finance, provides expert advice on how the stock market works, what shares are all about and what the wise investor should look out for. Drawing upon his years of experience as a broker and an investment adviser, he offers a fresh perspective on the inner workings of the Indian stock market. But, most importantly, he informs the reader of winning strategies-the tools, weapons and intelligence needed to navigate the market. The book covers, among other topics, market mechanics, how the price of a stock is determined, tools of the trade, stock market indices, developing an investment philosophy and what kind of stocks to pick.
Extremely reader-friendly, this book should enable even a layman investor to rub shoulders confidently with the bulls and the bears of the stock market.
The Other Side of Belief
Described as the thinker who shuns thought, U.G. Krishnamurti is the most enigmatic and iconoclastic ‘anti-guru’ of our times. His conviction that doubt is the other side of belief emerged from an uncompromising negation of everything that can be expressed, not from a desire for some ‘comfy dialectical thesis’.
The Other Side of Belief Interpreting U G. Krishnamurti is a candid and refreshing chronicle ofUG’s life and the evolution of his radical outlook and ideas. Tracing the development of UG’s notion of enlightenment as a series of biological mutations devoid of mystical or religious connotations, Mukunda Rao weaves a complex portrait—of a man who doesn’t hesitate to challenge and demolish society’s most cherished and comforting values and ideals, but nonetheless commands a most fervent respect and veneration from multitudes of admirers.
UG has always been adamant that life must be described in pure and simple physical and physiological terms so that it is de-psychologized and demystified. He underwent, in his own words, a ‘calamity’: a series of bodily metamorphoses that catapulted him into the unique state of the ‘declutched’ mind. This book gives the reader a vivid description of UG’s cellular revolution’ and an intensely personal insight into UG’s unflinching and relentless insistence on freedom from the ‘stranglehold of thought.’
With a foreword by Mahesh Bhatt, film-maker and lifelong admirer of UG, The Other Side of Belief offers a searching exploration of the incredible charisma of a man who has transformed the lives of people all over the world.
Confessions Of An Indian Woman Eater
‘I now realize that leaving home was a gesture, like goodbye notes from failed suicides.’
Amit Ray leaves his upper-class home in India with nine books in his bag and seventy rupees in his pocket, beginning his journey into ‘Life’. His story runs a hectic course, from Calcutta to New Delhi and, after a poignant and disastrous Italian interlude, on to London whores, scatological misadventures, Paris, København and back to London. In-between he works variously as a shoeshine boy, cub reporter, lavatory attendant, engineer and writer. The twentieth-century Odysseus, Amit is obsessed with that contraband comestible?Woman. Adam-and-Eve confrontations lead the hero into situations which are in turn lurid, erotic, pathetic, tender and sometimes outrageously hilarious.
Like a beaver, Amit noses his way into that elusive enclave, the ‘Hampstead intellectual circuit’, and learns of the tribal customs, unspoken dogmas and ambiguous hostilities of fellow humans who would feign to know all the answers. And like the proverbial cork, he bobs up and down but never sinks. At the end of the story we find him packing his bags to revisit the land of his birth. There is a hint of thirst quenched. But if we have come to know the hero at all, we must assume that it is only a calm before another storm.
Bollywood Nation
Bollywood Nation charts the evolution of Indian cinema from its mythological films in the early 20th century to its world-class gangster and terrorist melodramas of today. In doing so, the book investigates why and how our films have become so deeply embedded in the nation’s popular imagination. Is it merely that cinema is the only common form of mass national culture in a country that does not have either a common language or a common religion—or is it entwined with greater social, cultural and spiritual aspirations?
By narrating the story of India through the stories that our films tell us, Vamsee Juluri posits cinema as the voice of the nation and examines how it has shaped our understanding of our place in the world.
Noor
Ayesha is a twenty-something reporter in one of the world’s most dangerous cities. Her assignments range from showing up at bomb sites and picking her way through scattered body parts to interviewing her boss’s niece, the couture-cupcake designer. In between dicing with death and absurdity, Ayesha despairs over the likelihood of ever meeting a nice guy, someone like her old friend Saad, whose shoulder she cries on after every romantic misadventure. Her choices seem limited to narcissistic, adrenaline-chasing reporters who’ll do anything to get their next story—to the spoilt offspring of the Karachi elite who’ll do anything to cure their boredom. Her most pressing problem, however, is how to straighten her hair during the chronic power outages.
Karachi, You’re Killing Me! is Bridget Jones’s Diary meets The Diary of a Social Butterfly—a comedy of manners in a city with none.
Conversations With Waheeda Rehman
‘A remarkable book’ — Vogue
In this highly acclaimed book of conversations with Nasreen Munni Kabir, Waheeda Rehman speaks about her life and work with refreshing honesty, humour and insight: from detailing her personal triumphs and tribulations to giving enthralling accounts of working with cinematic personalities like Guru Dutt, Satyajit Ray, Raj Kapoor and Dev Anand. Against all odds, she successfully made a life in cinema on her own terms. Filled with compelling anecdotes and astute observations, this is a riveting slice of film history that provides a rare view of a much-adored and award-winning screen legend.
‘Insightful . . . Rehman speaks with honesty and humour’-India Today
‘An engaging and revealing account’-Rajeev Masand
‘A fascinating account of a great actor’s life’-Anupama Chopra
‘Delightful . . . Candid, real and personal’-Dawn
Bijnis Woman
These strange, funny, intriguing tales from small-town Uttar Pradesh have been passed down orally from one generation to the next. They are likely to make one exclaim, ‘This couldn’t have happened!’, even as the narrators swear they are nothing but fact.
The bizarre chronicle of a lazy daughter-in-law, the court clerk who loved eating chaat, two cousins inseparable even in death, a blind teacher who fell in love with a woman with beautiful eyes, and other wild tales from Bareilly, Lucknow, Hapur, Badaun, Sapnawat and Pilibhit-places big and small-in that fascinating part of India called Uttar Pradesh.